It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Lovely performances by each and every cast in this movie ! Must watch if you love theatre actors

This movie is worth its efforts to document the tragic events of 2002 riots in Gujarat, with the main personality behind this project being Nandita Das, who happens to be the director besides being one of the writers, definitely made this movie without having an eye at the box-office. The movie effectively portrays, people from various strata of society getting affected. Such communal riots are not new to India, although their frequency is gradually on decline since independence, but the mere concern to empathize with the victims through this project is laudable, irrespective of the trigger for the same being the burnt railway coach at Godhra. Whenever future generations wants to know and visualize about this incident, then this movie will definitely play an important role along with some other movies like Parzania on the same event.

'Firaaq', made by first time film-maker Nandita Das on a limited budget, explores the aftermath of India's Hindu-Muslim riots of 2002. Specifically, it explores the complex ways in which members of a community that has committed an atrocity are more or less complicit in what has happened. The film works by telling five parallel stories, and crucially, they all occur once the main killing is over; what we see is how those who have survived deal with what has happened. In pure cinematic terms, it's not the most sophisticated film ever made, nor does it have the most intricate plot; but it's impressive how Das avoids the temptation to reduce her story to mainstream cliché; and thereby finds some insight into the darkest depths of human behaviour.

I want to applaud Nandita Das to have chosen a complex theme—the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots—as her directorial debut. Her heart is in the right place but the film as a narrative does not work for me. The four or five story tracks, all dealing with one or other aspect of the Gujarat riots, muddle the flow of the narrative. The problem is not with the editing or how the sequences segue into each other but with the choice of the stories and their episodic nature. Each story seems to be a stand alone piece. As the narrative progresses, they all hurtle towards climaxes of their own, frittering away the combined tension (and its resolution) that could have resulted had they all come to a confluence. Would that be too tricky or clichéd (a la Priyadarshan)? That is certainly debatable. The tracks themselves are fascinating on their own. I loved the Naseeruddin Shah/Raghuvir Yadav track. Naseer plays the Muslim musician's character with so much depth and dignity. The portrayal was so poignant (especially the conclusion where Naseer finally admits: Music does not have the power to transcend such great communal hatred). To which Yadav's character, the ever so scared and paranoid Muslim assistant, says: If you start thinking like this, what hope is there for people like me?While watching the film, I was as aghast as Naseer's character was when we find out that Wali Dakhni's grave had been razed and a road has been built on that ground by the government of Gujarat. If Wali, a part of our history and heritage, is not important in India, then what place insignificant people like me have in a modern India? The Deepti Naval/Paresh Rawal track is saved by the small boy whose haunting eyes ask all viewers at the end of the movie: what wrong did I do? Why is my present pathetic and future bleak? Why am I in a ghetto? Gosh, who can stand those innocent searching eyes?The Tisca Chopra/Sanjay Suri track (the use of a neutral name Samir in a communally charged city, Hindu Muslim marriage) was interesting. What Samir does at the end really required a lot of balls. In real life, as a Muslim, it would be hard for me to admit what he admitted. The auto-rickshaw driver and his wife's track is perhaps the most muddled one. So many things happen to them on screen and yet their characters are not that well developed. The director also shows a little weakness in executing some scenes in this episode.Firaaq means separation in Urdu. The film shows the separation of the two communities—Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat. Where are the villains who are creating this communal rift, who control the mechanics of the flow of hatred in the birthplace of Gandhi? The film does not ask this question and that perhaps has enfeebled this entire project. But, honestly, I can't even blame Nandita for not taking this route to tell her story. Till today, even after the Tehelka expose, the Godhra incident remains an unsolved mystery and many of the perpetrators of the Gujarat communal carnage still remain unpunished. www.zafaranjum.com www.dreamink.blogspot.com